Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best Open Source CRM/ERP System For a Small Business?
An anonymous reader writes "One of my coworkers recently left the company, and I had to take over most of his responsibilities, including the maintenance and development of a homegrown CRM/ERP system. The system has evolved over more than a decade under the hands of at least four different developers and is based on Microsoft Access. Since I have been assigned this additional role, a day rarely passes without a user yelling for help because some part of the software is failing in strange and unpredictable ways, or some of the entered data has to be corrected manually in some obscure table in one of several database files. Without any exaggeration, some of the Visual Basic source code would be sufficient for several stories on The Daily WTF, and could make a grown man cry. Instead of spending further hours on optimizing this software i would rather like to start from scratch with some existing open-source CRM/ERP system that can be adapted to my companies needs. So far I have looked at and tested several CRM systems, including SugarCRM, vtiger, Feng Office (formerly known as opengoo), Zurmo and Fat Free CRM. Feng Office and Fat Free CRM look really nice and easy to use; the other ones could take a bit less bloat but are fine nevertheless. What software would you choose?"
"Just went through this nonsense. Switch to Insightly. It's easy and it works better than the open source alternatives, plus you don't have to host it."
Insightly is CRM. It doesn't do ERP.
But that brings up a good point: CRM and ERP are fundamentally different tasks. I doubt OP will find many packages that do both well. My suggestion would be to look for them separately.
Forget maintaining / rolling your own. Doesn't make ANY sense, especially when this thing got dropped in your lap.
Salesforce.com for CRM.
Workday for ERP.
Sleep at night. Priceless.
The existing implementation looks complex because it codifies hundreds of special business rules, such as discounts for the boss's friends, special commission arrangements with a particular salesperson, etc. You can't just throw out those rules, so you end up maintaining the old system simultaneously with trying to implement the new system.
The issue isn't that setting up a new system is wrong; the issue is that there is no documentation or specification for the existing setup, therefore it's not actually possible to do anything with it. Generally, nobody in the business that is supposed to be responsible for or understand the business requirements are prepared to spend any time formulating them. What's left is for the implementers to determine business rules as best they can, due to apathy from management. Which turns into scapegoating when the system doesn't function according to the spec that existing in people's heads, but never anywhere the implementers could see it.
I've been around that loop many times, too.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face